Category: DVD/BLU-RAY

It bears repeating: there are no trolls in “Troll 2.” The 1990 feature was originally shot under the title “Goblins” before the wild ways of film distribution ended up branding the movie as a sequel to 1986’s “Troll” without having a connection to it. Writer/director Claudio Fragasso doesn’t have any control over the name of the picture, but he’s in charge of making something at least passably competent with the endeavor, and he fails spectacularly. “Troll 2” is often found on lists of the worst movies of all time, and it certainly earns such branding if one comes to the offering expecting a consistent, capably made horror film about vegetarian goblins looking to devour visitors to a small Utah town called Nilbog. Fragasso wipes out spectacularly with sincerity, throwing together a poorly executed and frightfully performed display of utter nonsense that’s filled with padding and scripted without thought. However, as a Bad Movie Night selection, “Troll 2” has more appeal, triggering plenty of unintentional laughs as the effort fumbles around pursuing bizarre ideas, armed with clunky low-budget craftsmanship. It could be fun for some viewers, and cinematic punishment for others. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1986’s “At Close Range” is “based on a true story,” dramatizing the brutal ways and family ties surrounding gang leader Bruce Johnston Sr., who embarked on a reign of terror around rural Pennsylvania in the 1960s and ’70s. Screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (son of director Elia Kazan) looks to turn such headline news into a more intimate drama about a father and son experiencing the development of a toxic relationship while working to figure each other out. It’s the stuff of high drama, but director James Foley (coming off 1984’s “Reckless”) doesn’t pursue the melodramatic potential of the piece. Instead, the helmer generates an intensely moody understanding of bonds and games of intimidation in the endeavor, moving forward with a semi-spare study of reactions and threats. The feature carries a level of intensity as it explores a dark reunion between Brad Jr. (Sean Penn), a wayward teen who’s not interested in a future, and Brad Sr. (Christopher Walken), the leader of a criminal gang looking for opportunities in a rural location, confronted by responsibilities he has no interest in. “At Close Range” is a troubling picture, as Kazan offers a cold-blooded examination of Brad Sr.’s lethal seductions and overall viciousness, finding strong tension in scenes of direct conflict. Foley isn’t always interested in creating the most propulsive effort here, with pacing an issue as the story gradually unfolds, but he’s committed to a more interior life for the characters, searching for ways to generate emotional moments handled by gifted actors, creating some sensational moments of pressure along the way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Horror can be a tough business, and it’s even harder when there’s limited imagination for frights in charge of the picture. Making his filmmaking debut is YouTuber Chris Stuckmann, who hopes to deliver a thoroughly terrifying feature in “Shelby Oaks,” though he doesn’t have much to work with in what’s truly a very dull endeavor. Lifting from movies such as “The Blair Witch Project” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” Stuckmann doesn’t have drive to really launch into disturbing behavior. Instead, he’s positioned himself somewhere between a found-footage endeavor and a chiller, never quite settling on a single approach to make sense of his main idea. “Shelby Oaks” aims to be creepy, but it’s painfully generic and poorly paced, resembling most other low-budget genre efforts in the marketplace with its strange appreciation of suspense and uneventful plotting. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1985 was a big year for Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy. The pair enjoyed box office success with roles in “The Breakfast Club” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” also experiencing a massive surge in media interest with their positions in “Brat Pack” stories, highlighting their youthful takeover of the film business. In 1986, career momentum was suddenly halted, with the duo reteaming for “Blue City,” a picture that hoped to ride a wave of overexposure to financial fortunes, only to end up a bomb. And there’s a few good reasons for audience rejection, with the endeavor showing signs of editorial struggle that results in an awkward viewing experience. “Blue City” has its messiness and miscastings, and while director Michelle Manning has a way with the visual presence of the effort, she can’t hold any type of consistent story together, with the final cut jumping from incident to incident without much connective tissue. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Rachael Cain has a lot of ideas for “Somnium,” her helming debut. And she’s determined to try and squeeze them all into a single movie. It’s a story involving the loneliness of an aspiring actress in Los Angeles, her heartbreak involving her ex-boyfriend, the mysteries of producer support in Hollywood, and the strangeness of employment at a sleep center. Cain gives herself 90 minutes to work through quite a lot of ideas and feelings in the picture, but focus is the main element missing from the endeavor. “Somnium” hopes to be a penetrating drama and something vaguely resembling a horror feature, but it never fully settles on one idea. It’s not a mess, just incredibly half-baked, leaving the audience with an assortment of emotions, subplots, and moods that don’t fully connect in the end. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

A remote hotel in the dead of winter. Troubled characters dealing with the possible melting of their minds. Strange visions around the property. Murder coming for all. There’s clearly a beloved horror film serving as the inspiration for “Bad Things,” with writer/director Stewart Thorndike looking to revive the chilling ways of isolation and psychological disruption with the effort, taking viewers to a strange getaway for a group of friends who have little respect for one another, facing unexpected finality during what’s meant to be a week of partying. Thorndike doesn’t have a budget, but she has a location, doing okay with the emptiness of the hotel setting and all the secrets it contains. However, a little disturbing behavior doesn’t carry “Bad Things,” which only connects in select moments, while the rest of the endeavor plays like a community theater production of “The Shining.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

One could certainly appreciate 1981’s “Taxi zum Klo” as a study of life for a gay man in West Germany, detailing his encounters in the area as he tries to maintain work and play. Writer/director/star Frank Ripploh has something in mind with the endeavor, electing to make a picture about experiences, following the main character as he hunts for carnal events and falls into a relationship while dealing with friends and strangers. However, Ripploh also wants to examine the perils of cohabitation and love, ending up with an easily distracted feature that carries on for too long, especially when it attempts to explore a story that fails to provide much of a dramatic hold. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Pee-wee Herman was becoming a big deal for actor Paul Reubens in the 1980s. He scored attention with the creation, and success when generating a stage show for the nerdly character, earning spots on late night television and the attention of Hollywood producers. In 1985, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” was the first real nationwide test of the character’s appeal, pairing Reubens (who co-scripts with Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol) with director Tim Burton, a young talent making his feature-length debut with the endeavor. The idea was to take Pee-wee’s strange ways and stick them into a story about an outsider hunting for his stolen bicycle, but something wonderful happened to the project during its creation. Burton and Reubens found a way to take something potentially goofy and turn it into a splendid celebration of cinematic imagination, with visual and performance mischief found everywhere in the endeavor. “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” is a special film, sharing an exquisite amount of playfulness and low-budget inventiveness during its run time, allowing Burton to run wild with his youthful interpretation of Pee-wee’s bizarre world of panic, road trip connections, and indefatigable determination to right a horrible wrong. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Joe Begos is a fan of exploitation movies, and he’s been trying to replicate the approach of these films throughout his career. He’s had some visibility with endeavors such as “VFW” and “Christmas Bloody Christmas,” and he goes ultra-independent with “Jimmy and Stiggs,” which was shot inside his own apartment for almost no money, while cast and crew is mostly made up of pals who endured the three-year-long production journey. It’s an alien invasion picture, but certainly not a traditional one, as Begos (who also stars in the film) arranges a splatter-fest with the offering, keeping the tale contained to a single setting, and filling up this place with as much blood and guts as possible. “Jimmy and Stiggs” is a mess in many ways, and while it maintains a defiant attitude and enjoyable technical credits, the viewing experience also feels like a prison sentence at times, as Begos loves extremity and nothing else. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2009, Emily Hagins was the subject of the documentary, “Zombie Girl: The Movie.” The feature focused on Hagins and her moviemaking dreams, embarking on a mission to create her first project as a 12 year old, finding help from her parents and pals as they attempted to generate a proper horror experience. “Zombie Girl: The Movie” was a delight, and Hagins has seemingly pulled off the impossible, managing to build something of a career as she became an adult, eventually launching three follow-up projects (“My Sucky Teen Romance,” “Grow Up, Tony Phillips,” and “Coin Heist”) and various short films, maintaining some longevity in an industry that’s a true survival challenge. 2023’s “Sorry About the Demon” is Hagins’s fourth offering, and she sticks with her love of genre entertainment, attempting to mount a horror comedy about a twentysomething man and his war with insecurity as he deals with a recent breakup and the reality that he’s sharing a new rental home with a demonic force of doom. “Sorry About the Demon” isn’t ambitious, remaining dialogue-driven and sticking with a single location, and Hagins has some difficulty deciding what kind of movie she wants to make, as the comedy is limp and the scares are nonexistent in this overlong effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Horror films have a long history of addressing real world problems through the fantasy of fear. “Slapface” takes aim at the issue of bullying, with writer/director Jeremiah Kipp constructing a monster movie that touches on deep psychological situations of abandonment and isolation, following the lead character’s experience with a mysterious entity as he struggles to make sense of grief. “Slapface” is a low-budget production, often fighting against some visual ideas that don’t work, and performances aren’t always where they should be, but Kipp has an idea worth following in the feature, which does an effective job communicating abyssal pain and fear that’s starting to consume young minds, leaving them confused and exposed to an outside evil that works in strange ways. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Co-writer/director Tyler Taormina made an impression on indie film audiences with 2019’s “Ham on Rye.” The helmer invested in atmosphere, not storytelling, examining the behaviors and social interactions of teenagers as they prepare for a party. Taormina wasn’t interested in plot, just the vibe, and he returns to the same idea for “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” which takes the “Ham on Rye” concept and transfers it to the holiday season. There’s a family gathering to inspect in the feature, bringing all types of personalities together for a celebratory evening where relationships are revisited and experiences are pursued. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” sustains Taormina’s filmmaking interests in shapelessness, but he’s remarkably observant when it comes to the creation of a reunion event with holiday flair. The picture is practically 3D in the way it captures household bustle and indulgence, creating some superbly vivid moments. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The holiday season is meant to inspire warmth and joy, but to horror filmmakers, it’s a ripe opportunity to bring ghoulishness to the screen. 2021’s “The Advent Calendar” is a Belgian production that looks to disrupt the wonders of Christmas by offering a highly bizarre tale of a gift that keeps giving, and in increasingly malicious ways. Writer/director Patrick Ridremont shows some imagination with the picture, examining the tension of a young woman dealing with an unusual German present that takes command of her life, testing her sanity as the countdown to Christmas continues. “The Advent Calendar” is actually more a genie-style examination of wish-granting, following the main character’s journey into a different reality she wants for herself, only to be asked to sacrifice so much to keep it. Ridremont has a strong opening half, tracking the passage of days and the prizes inside the eponymous gift, achieving a strong atmosphere of mystery and menace as the central story develops. The endeavor eventually starts to lose focus in its second half, but there’s enough presented here to deliver on some welcome oddity and intensity as the main character experiences a very special countdown to Christmas. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

When making a movie about the lives of paramedics, intensity to a point of insanity is always the atmosphere. There’s nothing cozy about the vocation, which demands everything from employees, especially those working in troubled areas of the country. Madness is the journey, but co- writer/director Christopher Leone makes a valiant attempt to find some dark humor in the details of life and death. “Code 3” strives to follow the rocket sled ride of EMS life during a 24-hour-long shift for two veterans and a rookie, sending them around Los Angeles as they encounter people in dire need of medical treatment. Leone and co-writer Patrick Pianezza aim for realism in the work, delivering a disturbing understanding of mental illness and physical damage involved in this world. They also try to keep the feature at least somewhat approachable, giving star Rainn Wilson an opportunity to deliver perhaps the best performance of his career in a supremely challenging role. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

People love shark attack cinema. Earlier this year, “Dangerous Animals” found release, which attempted to subvert the norm in the subgenre, playing around with human predators instead of strictly oceanic ones. And now Japan tries their luck with horrors from the deep in “Hotspring Sharkattack,” which is about an unserious as a film can get. We’ve done the “Sharknado” thing too many times, but writer/director Morihito Inoue delivers a different kind of wackiness with his presentation of death and destruction. He goes camp, but creatively so in the picture, which examines chaos caused by deadly ancient sharks awakened from the deep due to commercial development, seeking revenge on all for such an offense. “Hotspring Sharkattack” is low-budget and loving it, and while there’s definitely a limit on such exaggeration, Inoue has some imagination for his lunacy, mounting a bizarre and amusing riff on sharksploitation bedlam. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As the United States of America prepares to experience its semiquincentennial in 2026, directors Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt look to return to the formation of the states in “The American Revolution.” The six-part documentary means to walk viewers through years of conflict, taking the development of war almost one step at a time while examining rising tensions between Colonists and British occupation, creating a path to a prolonged and bloody battle. The production remains in line with previous projects from Burns, electing to pore over the details of the era and its personalities to present a richer understanding of motivations. And without the benefit of film footage and photographs, the series turns to paintings, documents, and brief recreations to best bring viewers into this march of history. “The American Revolution” is a reliable offering of information, tastefully organized as always, but it also aims to be a timely remembrance of sacrifice, betrayals, and various survival challenges, physically, mentally, and politically, putting viewers into contact with the scope of the war and the ragged formation of a nation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The children’s matinee. There was once a time in film exhibition history when theaters actively encouraged attendance from family audiences, luring them in with cheaper tickets and earlier showtimes, supplying a calendar of squeaky clean cinematic entertainment to keep youngsters glued to the screen while parents endured the pictures, slept, or simply allowed their kids to head to the local theater on their own to seek age-appropriate entertainment. These offerings rarely represented the finest projects production companies could create. They were mostly cheapy, short endeavors meant to be paired with cartoons and assorted distractions, delivered to viewers who were simply happy to be out of the house. “Krazee Kidz Video Party” is a collection of obscure efforts aimed at little ones, putting 1957’s “The Big Bad Wolf,” 1965’s “Fun in Balloon Land,” the 1960’s television show “Polly Pockets,” 1963’s “Kingdom of Cracked Mirrors,” and 1965’s “The Princess and the Magic Frog” on a single disc to help relive or revive the experience of surviving colorful, brightly performed, tedious nonsense. It’s a real viewing challenge, but “Krazee Kidz Video Party” is also a terrific reminder of a different time in movie theater patronage. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1983’s “Men from the Gutter” is a lot of things. Director Ngai Choi Lam is in charge of keeping an easily distracted screenplay in order, overseeing the development of many subplots and a community of characters, with everyone assigned their own special motivation. The picture is not an epic crime story or even a rousing supercop thriller, often stuck attempting to juggle so much when it comes to characters and their missions of justice and crime. It’s not the most engaging feature around, but the production makes a wise choice to try and add excitement whenever possible, keeping the pace up as chases are periodic and brutality is common, generating some momentum to help the offering when the storytelling gets a little stuck in the murky details of character lives. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The massive success of 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” certainly spawned plenty of copycats, putting producers to work dreaming up stories involving alien visitors and the young humans who love them. Traces of the Spielberg smash can still be found in cinema today, with “Xeno” clearly inspired by the classic film, providing a tale of discovery and bonding with a monstrous creature who’s drawn to the benevolent ways of a teen girl. However, there’s very little that’s cuddly in the feature, as writer/director Matthew Loren Oates aims to push his PG-13 rating with the material, which has its sweet moments, but also a violent side. A little extra intimidation factor helps “Xeno” achieve a different type of atmosphere, which is welcome, and there’s some wonderful technical surprises, as Oates dials down CGI achievements in the movie, turning to the Jim Henson Creature Shop to create the eponymous visitor, giving the endeavor a sense of the real as it deals with fantasy conflicts. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Screenwriter Joshua Friedlander has something devious in mind with “Bone Lake,” and perhaps cineastes have seen this type of twisted game before. The picture isn’t really a horror experience until the final act, more closely resembling a riff on Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” for the majority of the feature, exploring tensions rising between two couples stuck in the same rental house for the weekend. Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (“Spoonful of Sugar”) creates a good deal of screen tension, working to reinforce various violations of trust and woozy temptations while the writing hopes to pull viewers in closer as things go all kinds of wrong for the characters. “Bone Lake” doesn’t have originality on its side, but there’s some moviemaking hustle to appreciate, as Morgan generates an atmosphere of uneasy interactions and growing paranoia. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com